Émile Gaboriau

Émile Gaboriau was a French journalist who effectively invented the police procedural. Working as secretary to a popular novelist, he learned the serial trade from the inside, then produced L'Affaire Lerouge in 1866 and created Monsieur Lecoq, a detective who works from physical traces and reconstructs a crime scene step by step. Conan Doyle knew the books well enough to have Sherlock Holmes dismiss Lecoq by name, which is the surest sign of influence there is. Gaboriau's plots turn on identity, inheritance and the documents that prove either, which is to say on the anxieties of a society where money had just become mobile. He wrote fast, died at forty, and was for decades read chiefly in poor translations that flattened him. He is better than those translations suggested.